The Philosophy Of Our Approach

The emphasis is on delivering stunning sound quality, with a design emphasis on time-domain accuracy, which delivers an openness and immediacy without any hint of unnatural aggression. This is what we hear when we listen to real music and we believe it lets the music speak for itself.

Our approach is highly scientific, but we are not wedded to prevailing scientific theories. The prevailing science applied in the audio industry is focused on the science of the equipment and fails to address the more complex science of how the brain delivers enjoyment from listening to music. The false premise has been that if the science of the equipment could be perfected then the need to understand how the ear/brain system works is unnecessary. The premise is a practical decision that is common in most science - to assume away the pieces of the puzzle where there is less hard evidence to go on. But assuming away the place where all the action occurs is a mistake. We don't find the accepted science gets anywhere near being able to isolate what kinds of distortion get in the way most with a human's ability to enjoy reproduced music, and the science often reduces a complex issue like harmonic distortion or digital signal distortion to a single number - which we consider to be utterly bizarre. Some timbre and time-domain distortions in an audio system have real-world analogs and some don't, and the unnatural distortions are not recognized by the ear/brain as real. This is the main reason that many prefer an otherwise more distorted analog source to a digital source. Experimentation to make great audio has to have a true reference point, which is how humans react emotionally to it. Just because that is unreliable, and hard to measure does not justify side-lining it in favor of a measure that may or may not be relevant.

Therefore, Antipodes approach has always been strict scientific experimentation, avoiding deductive or inductive leaps without verification, and our main measurements are the emotional reactions of an independent listening panel of local audiophiles. Many audiophiles make the mistake of listening for differences in the sound, not appreciating two important things. The first mistake is that they are using their cognitive brain to do this and the cognitive brain has no role in the enjoyment of music. The second mistake is to not realise that our listening process is an active one and not a passive one - what we think we hear is heavily affected by what we expect to hear, or the order in which we hear it. Our enjoyment of music comes from the limbic system in the brain, the source of human emotional reactions to our environment. The most relevant way to evaluate audio equipment is to ask yourself whether you are getting more or less emotionally involved with the music.